UNTRAINED

Nothing Hidden, Much Gained.
RealTime
March 2009
Reviewed by Carl Nilsson-Polias
The titles of Lucy Guerin’s recent works have been marked by clarity and transparency, even
literalness. Structure and Sadness dealt with the aftermath of grief caused by the west gate
bridge collapse. Melt was a duet for two water molecules that move from ice through to
steam. Corridor limited itself to a long traverse stage and took a corridor scene from Kafka
as its inspiration. And now Untrained juxtaposes two artists trained as dancers with two
artists untrained as dancers.
Contrast these examples with the titular and choreographic opacity of Shelley Lasica’s
Vianne and there would appear to be nothing hidden in Guerin’s world, nothing that is so
mysterious that it cannot be elucidated in a simple, perfectly decipherable title. For her
critics, this is a cause for frustration: her works can be seen as the physical equivalent of
begging the question in rhetoric, where the proposition assumes its own truth before being
argued. In other words, is the dance redundant once you read the program notes?
Yet, aside from the inherent value judgements involved in meriting metaphor over
literalness, describing Guerin’s dance as redundant is to deny its capacity to transcend the
admittedly literal text that tries to encapsulate it. Guerin is not given to ornateness in her
language but her sensibility for the human form is far from plain—the duets across her
body of work are remarkable in their mesmerising intimacy, their detail and their capacity to
enliven the space between the dancers as much as they animate the bodies themselves.
Moreover, by starting with such conceptual distillation, Guerin’s work emerges from a kind
of purity, with every subsequent extrapolation seeming to fit and flow on perfectly from the
last.
Indeed, it is a questioning of purity that lies at the heart of Untrained. The title is easily
decipherable, yes, but what is it to be untrained? Is the untrained body pure in its
movement—unfettered by the conditioning of choreography and exercises? Or is it the
trained body, in its refinement and exactitude, that achieves purity by sublimation? Guerin
is certainly not looking for an easy solution to this dialectic. She is interested in what it does
to us as an audience and to the performers themselves to see these questions made
manifest by exploring the continuum from pure naivety to pure technique.
Her staging of Untrained maintains this notion of purity. The set is nothing more than a grey
playing square marked out by broad white lines. It is a clever delimiter, its form suggestive